An Unlikely Alliance Ch. 01

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This is the first part of a three-part thing.

I was looking through some of the left-over things that I'd written for laughs and had one of those "oh yeah" moments. This should really go into the Celebrities category, but it will be blended with something I wrote a long time ago which has nothing to do with the setting in this one, so overall, I decided to put it here.

This is set in Skyrim, from the Elder Scrolls series of games. Most of the characters and places are out of that game and so those things are the property of Bethesda Game Studios.

The main character is Dhaerys Mishaxi, an Akaviri soldier, one of a small band sent from a distant land to deal with a dragon threat before it worsens. Her kind are believed to be gone from the place that she ends up.

Khali is a Khajiit girl. The Khajiit are a race of mostly bipedal feline folk who are often shunned and viewed with mistrust here. Most of those ones are of specific type and Khali is of another one, but the humans here are very quick to look down on her kind.

If you're a Skyrim purist, maybe read something else. If you don't know the game, it might be better that way, I dunno.

Hope you like it.

0_o

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As Dhaerys Mishaxi slowly dragged her way to full wakefulness, she thought at first that she was back on the ship. That long and storm-tossed journey which had brought them all here to this cursed place.

But ...

But as had happened all throughout history it seemed, whenever any of their kind had attempted to journey to Tamriel, more often than not, many had not survived storms of the trip. There had been times long ago when her people had invaded, it was true, but invasion in and of itself had not been the thrust of the effort even then.

They'd come chasing the dragons which had managed to escape the continent of Akavir. And though her people had arrived in enough numbers perhaps to make it seem like an invasion to the inhabitants at the time, what was never spoken of openly to them even much later was that those who had come were only a fraction of the force which had left to journey here. The rest had never survived to set foot dry land.

She and nineteen others had been given passage on a small, but fast and fully-crewed ship to come. They'd been sent by the Tsaesci king himself, for there was word out of this absurdly cold land that the dragons were back, and this time, there was an actual purpose behind their reprise - one which threatened everyone in this world. The first one of the dragons mentioned in the reports was the World Eater himself, gone from all knowledge for many centuries but returned now somehow.

News traveled instantly between properly trained mages stationed an ocean apart in the service of the king. That was how it had been pieced together and the threat known long before the Imperials and the Nords in Skyrim had been bothered to notice the beasts.

This journey was no invasion, either. It was nothing more than a little prudent planning on the part of the king. It seemed that he had little faith in the abilities of the Imperials of Cyrodiil and even less in those of the Nords to the north of them to wake up and deal with something which could destroy the world.

Dhaerys and the others had been briefed regarding what was expected of them as well as the lay of the land as much as was possible. To no one's surprise, they learned that what few of their kind had remained from the original group on Tamriel, they'd been assimilated into the Imperial culture of Cyrodiil and were long gone over the course of the centuries from then until now.

The original invaders had successfully surrendered to the one who would become the first of the Cyrodiilian emperors and managed to give themselves jobs as his protectors and bodyguards when they weren't busy touting his "divine" right to rule.

And another but ...

According to the very few Akaviri agents still operating in Tamriel, Dhaerys and her companions were not supposed to exist. The lore told that the Tsaesci - who were said to be vampiric - had killed and eaten all of the Akaviri people. Well that was simplistic allegory for a forced alliance at best and a poor joke at worst.

From what she'd managed to gather for herself after landing on the rocky, boulder-strewn coast a month ago, the people here loved to tell and hear tales, and it didn't seem to particularly matter if they were fanciful or even partly true. Any gaps in the factual telling were filled in with cattle shit by someone eventually and sooner or later the garbage would be accepted and rarely questioned by anyone.

Sadly, that seemed to include what passed for scholars here.

Dhaerys was an Akaviri of exceptionally pure lineage - as were they all to have been selected for this. She and her companions had been hand-picked and the purity of their bloodlines had come in for a great deal of scrutiny.

Some of the others had made much of it during the trip across, but Dhaerys never had. To her, it was more a matter of accident that her bloodline was known to someone who had insisted that it could be traced back to the ones who had been so effective in the slaughter of the dragons of Akavir - back when there had been any.

Dhaerys stemmed from one of the most famed families of dragonslayers there had ever been back home. More than that, her family had long been one of the very few such who were renowned as stealthy and relentless fighters afterward. They had to be. There hadn't been any dragons on the continent of her birth for many centuries and everyone has to make a living, don't they?

She'd never made much of her heritage to the rest. There'd been no point anyway. Many of the others had won their selections because of the subtleties of knowing someone who knew someone and so on. Dhaerys had never had either the time or the patience for it. With no dragons to hunt, her father's family had turned their abilities to what there was for them. They were soldiers - and famed ones in a long line.

Dhaerys was a soldier.

She might have magical ability in spades and the reflexes and speed of a ripsaw with a blade in her hand.

But first, last, and everything else, she'd been a part of the King's Akaviri elite since she was seventeen. She'd seen a lot in those eight years, enough to know that few like her live long lives. That's why she was here. That's why she'd jumped to agree to go in the group, to be a part of this covert quest.

The general state of fitness - or lack of it - had dismayed their instructors, and so they'd imposed requirements for them all to be gotten into shape. Dhaerys hadn't said a thing, making no comment either way. She'd left them all in the dust. Her previous militaristic lifestyle along with some good genetics had given her a level of fitness which most of the rest couldn't hope to begin to match. They groused about it and some went out of their way to trip her up as often as they could. She'd said nothing and just kept herself in shape.

The one time that an instructor had asked why she'd taken the abuse so stoically, Dhaerys had laughed quietly and shrugged. She'd replied that for all of the garbage, there was no one here actively trying to kill her. That was what she was used to during the campaigns that she'd fought. Matched against that, this was a joy, she'd said.

With a little luck, they could kill all of the dragons before the reasons for their rise could come to pass.

With a little insane luck, she might make a new life for herself out of the service of a king who was not of her own people.

Of course, those were her privately - held views before it all fell apart.

To be born into the Mishaxi family, one of the first sights which met your newborn eyes was the traditional tiny, curved wooden sword that your mother had pressed into your little hand, curling your tiny fingers around the haft during the ceremony where you were given your name just as soon as it was noted that your dark little eyes were open and actually seeing things around them.

Unlike most other humanoids on this world, for her kind, it typically happened within the first few minutes of one's life, not long before the instinct to hide that gaze took over and your irises became defined in whatever color you unwittingly chose as the rest of the eyeballs turned white.

For her particular part of the family, tradition held that the sword went into your right hand. What was pressed into the left was a small piece of a fallen star. It was only ceremonial in most cases, a bit of a traditional hope that you would have some magical ability. In almost all cases, that was as close to the truth as it came - a faint and vain hope.

In Dhaerys' case however, it seemed that whatever ability had eluded her forebears had all been saved up for her somehow and no one had an answer for it, other than to maybe explain some of her family's insane luck in battle. Dhaerys however; she was capable of things far beyond whatever the traditional faint hope might encompass. And there wasn't anything vain about it.

In Dhaerys, all of it came to her. The rest of her company were of most classes, each one with some mix of talents and all of them exceptional bladesmen or women. There were even three of what some might know as mages besides her, and though she made no effort at the sort of displays that the others did, she knew that of the twenty, she was the one with one foot in both worlds on either side of the arcane line and she excelled at them both quite naturally.

Like all of her kind, Dhaerys' eyes seldom revealed the darkness within. It took moments of extreme emotion to bring out the dark, featureless blackness. There was nothing sinister about the trait; it was just a vestige from a long ago past which had been used to help see in dim surroundings. What was different was that, beneath the disguise, Akaviris could see in a wider arc. The hiding of it was a protective instinct among most true Akaviris and might never be seen by others of a different racial background.

Indeed it was assumed, probably correctly, that as the Akaviri blood of the ones here so long before had been thinned by interbreeding with the locals, that this latent characteristic had been lost.

It was probably just as well to Dhaerys' mind. With all of the dragons dead as far as anyone knew and with only mostly humans and the other creatures of Tamriel to fight, no one really needed the wide viewpoint that the feature provided.

Besides, in her admittedly limited experience on this continent, it tended to scare the shit out of anyone who saw you like that. So it stayed hidden most times.

She remembered a little more of her arrival after that. She recalled that she and four others had climbed over the side of the ship for the swim to shore at night. That had been the plan; to insert four teams in different places along the coast. Two of those teams had already gone ashore in other places.

The teams were to act independently. Their mission was to find and destroy any living dragons found without any support from anyone outside of their little teams. Dhaerys didn't know what had happened to the others. She only knew that by the time that she was ashore, scratched and deeply scraped from being tossed about among the rocks near the shore by the waves, the other four had already been killed by the same mechanism of wilds waves and sharp stones.

As she dragged herself up onto the strand and watched, the ship moved on and she was on her own.

Before she did anything else, Dhaerys searched for the bodies of the others again before the waves took them out of her reach for good.

Like her, each one had a cord around one ankle which was used to drag their buoyed bag of gear behind until they were out of the wild surf. There was little else that she could do but look through that was there to add to her own gear. They'd swum in nude and that was the way that she left them for whatever animals might have an interest. She took what she could and threw the rest into the sea.

This wasn't an invasion. But they were told to remain hidden if at all possible.

Everyone knew that it wouldn't be possible forever and that as the teams worked their way inland, they'd need to be able to interact with the locals somehow in order to make their way and glean news of the dragons. That was the reason for the long, seemingly endless language and culture lessons that they'd all had to get through.

It wasn't until two days after she'd come ashore alone that she'd seen the wreck of the ship on a shoal farther south down the coast. There were enough bodies visible at a quick glance to account for both the crew and the remaining two teams. That was the point at which she realized just how alone she was. If the first two teams had made it to shore with no losses, then there were now eleven of them here; two teams of five and herself.

But each team was to act independently of the others. She didn't know where they might be - somewhere up the coast to the north.

She only knew that she had no team.

She opened her eyes and knew she was in Gerdur's home, taking refuge there after blundering into an ambush and being clubbed over the head. She recalled that it had nearly led to her execution for nothing until the proceedings were disrupted by the timely arrival of a dragon who'd come for his own reasons and laid the whole place to ruin. She'd just escaped in the confusion with Ralof, Gerdur's brother who'd led her here.

Yesterday had been a hell of a long day, and even after coming here, it hadn't ended. She'd been incredibly lucky get her armor and gear back, along with her enchanted bow. But the gold that she'd been given before she and her team had slipped over the side had been taken from her while she was unconscious and she'd found herself penniless.

She'd made up for it in a really small way by scooping weapons and whatever she could get her hands on quickly while escaping with Ralof. With his directions, she'd gone to the only store in the little place where she was now and while selling it off, she'd heard of the trader's troubles and gone to hunt for this gold claw that he seemed to need to have and she'd retrieved it after a long crawl through a crypt-ful of undead in a barrow.

Dusty, filthy and well and truly tired then, she'd washed herself at Gerdur's and fallen asleep in no time.

The morning sun found Dhaerys walking toward Whiterun after leaving Ralof and his family with their best wishes. She was still smiling over Gerdur's slightly awkward yet heartfelt send-off.

"May you die with a sword in your hand" was an odd way to wish someone well, Dhaerys thought, but she knew where it came from.

You had to like these Nords, she thought. At least most of the ones that she'd gotten to know a little thus far. They were honest, hard-working types and they didn't like to complicate things.

She was eating an apple as she walked in the sunshine, liking the scenery and the crisp morning air a great deal. With a start, she realized that she was beginning to like it here and she wondered about it and herself for a little while.

The road was well laid out and other than one wolf, she saw no one on her way. When she got to a spot where she could see the plain where Whiterun sat, she stopped and stared a little. It was a bit of a majestic sight even though she did see that it was smaller than she'd thought at first. The city sat atop a low mountain and was smaller than it appeared at first. Her first impression was that the whole thing was the city and that wasn't the case.

She strolled on looking around at everything. She met a town guard and stopped to ask the way to the gates and she found him curious about her in the way that he looked at her, but he said nothing of it and answered her politely all the same.

As she walked up the road from the stables toward the gate a while later, she saw what she thought was a Khajiit and walked over out of curiosity.

He was a Khajiit as it turned out and more than that, he was from a caravan of traders camped at what looked to be a good distance from the city gates.

"Khajiit are not welcome in the towns so we must make our camps outside their walls," he said.

He directed her to the master trader and introduced her.

"This one's secret is ... safe with Ri'Saad," the trader said quietly in her language, "Still, it makes me wonder what an Akaviri soldier is doing here of all places - no matter how she chooses to dress."

"I seek to make a new life for myself," she replied, smiling shyly, "and I thank you for your promise of silence. The people here seem to believe that I am an Imperial with strange face paint and an odd accent."

"We are all here to make a new life, I think," Ri'Saad replied with a half-purring chuckle.

He leaned a little closer and whispered so that his people couldn't overhear as he pointed to his own face, "I know what it is - and why it is there. I have seen Akaviri soldiers before. They saved me and my family when I was still only a young kitten. I grew up in the homeland of my people, but I was born in Akavir.

Please, if you wish to trade, accept what discount that I can offer you. If you have something to sell I will give you the best that I can.

You are young though what is on your face tells that you have tasted battle. Perhaps the ones who saved my family were your uncles? It was long ago and far away, but I would not be here today if they had not helped us."

Dhaerys bowed a little, "You do me honor where it is not needed, Ri'Saad. I was a soldier there - once. Those times are behind me now. All that remains is what I carry on my face of those days - and a few scars. Some of it is as you say. The rest is what my family puts on their child warriors from birth. You are the first one that I have met who even knows what I am. The Akaviri are forgotten in Skyrim, it seems. I do not mind if it is so."

"Take it as small good fortune that they are forgetful," the cat smiled, "If they knew, they would regard you with more distrust than they show to us. Now, how may Ri'Saad assist this one?"

A few minutes of cheerful bartering later, Dhaerys pulled out her gems and Ri'saad's eyes widened in surprise.

"Come inside my little tent," he hissed a little urgently, "I do not keep enough gold on my person to trade for things like these.

Come, come. Let Ri'Saad see what he can do for you, my friend."

With a word, one of the females took his place at the front of the tent and the other two - who were in his employ as guards - took up positions from which they could easily defend their master and Dhaerys if there were a sudden need. "One can never be too careful on the road," Ri'Saad said.

"Now, you offer me all of these? I can give you good prices. Let Ri'Saad see ... Here - a flawless garnet and here - two lovely amethysts, all of them perfect and three diamonds?"

He held one of them up in a guarded manner as he appraised it's clarity and size.

"And emeralds this one offers me, not merely the malachites that so many bring to me in these lands. Oh, and here - a ruby!

Yes, ... " he smiled, "yes ... as lovely as you are.

And look here at this last one. A sapphire as blue as the seas near my homeland where one never needs to give a thought to ever having cold toes for the sand is always warm there."

He was silent for a moment as he regarded her offerings.

I can offer you ... seven."

Dhaerys was careful and asked, "Seven hundred?"

The trader chuckled, "Truly, this one is fortunate to have found Ri'Saad this day.

No, my friend. I offer seven thousand gold here and now. It is enough?"

Dhaerys' face almost ached as she fought back the urge to grin and laugh a little in delight. She nodded instead, "It is enough, kind Ri'Saad. This one knows her good fortune to have met you this day."